


That Crap May Have Just Saved Your Life: X-Files, "All Things"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [18]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Gender, Meta, Nonfiction, Time - Freeform, all things, gillian anderson - Freeform, space, women writers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 05:47:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2097909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What’s fascinating to me is how much of this episode is about Gillian using other women to rescue Scully from an existence which is structured and pretty much captured by patriarchal institutions. Specifically, it’s about getting her out of spaces that were shaped and are still dominated by men—the FBI building, Mulder’s office, the hospital—and the rigid, unforgiving, and linear time that prevails there. Instead, “All Things” opens up and emphasizes the interstitial moments and the marginalized spaces where life becomes deeply meaningful and restorative for Scully instead of—as it has been so much of the time on the X-Files—threatening, invasive, disorienting, and terrifying. And it does this, mainly, by engineering a series of chance encounters between Scully and other women, not all of them straight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Crap May Have Just Saved Your Life: X-Files, "All Things"

 

So, one of the signs of Chris Carter’s disengagement from The X-Files in its later seasons was that they started letting the inmates run the asylum—excuse me, letting the actors write episodes. Duchovny is given story credit for a lot of the early mythology episodes, but “The Unnatural” was his first solo effort; and after that, I guess, they figured they had to let everyone else do it. “En Ami,” written by William B. Davis, attempts to ‘humanize’ the Cigarette-Smoking Man, but as this involves making Scully far less intelligent and far more gullible than she usually is, in addition to giving CGB Spender the chance to drool over her in a little black dress, that episode just gave me hives all the way through. And then we have “All Things,” written by Gillian Anderson.

And it’s flawed…but it’s FASCINATING. Because, sure, the big news is Scully leaving Mulder in bed in the opening credits (more on that later); but what’s fascinating to me is how much of this episode is about Gillian using other women to rescue Scully from an existence which is structured and pretty much captured by patriarchal institutions. Specifically, it’s about getting her out of spaces that were shaped and are still dominated by men—the FBI building, Mulder’s office, the hospital—and the rigid, unforgiving, and linear time that prevails there. Instead, “All Things” opens up and emphasizes the interstitial moments and the marginalized spaces where life becomes deeply meaningful and restorative for Scully instead of—as it has been so much of the time on the X-Files—threatening, invasive, disorienting, and terrifying. And it does this, mainly, by engineering a series of chance encounters between Scully and other women, not all of them straight. Now of course the episode brings her back to Mulder in the end. But that’s only because—as Gillian Anderson writes him, anyway—Mulder is banging his head against the walls of patriarchal normativity almost as hard as she is, and so he is the only part of her ‘former’ life capable of entering and inhabiting the existence revealed to her in “All Things.”

So. Let me start by saying that Scully is not the only woman we’re dealing with here who’s spent the past 7 years pretty much isolated in a world created by and for men. We’re 156 episodes into this show now, and 151 of them were written by men. The other five are: “Shapes” by Marilyn Osborne; “Aubrey” and “The Calusari” by Sara B. Cooper; “Sanguinarium” by Vivian and Valerie Mayhew; and “Schizogeny,” co-written by Jessica Scott and Mike Wollaeger. Now, you look at this list, and you think Christ almighty, ladies, you’re really letting the team down. But look again, and you will see something else that connects these episodes apart from their all being pretty bad: They’re all monster of the weeks. David Duchovny has had his hand in several of the mythology episodes by this point, but no woman has ever been let near them. “All Things” is thus the first episode written by a woman that has any significant effect on characterization or story arc going forward.

When I first saw this episode I was sort of annoyed by how slow the pace was. But of course that’s the whole point: as Scully says in that scene in Mulder’s office, “we’re always running,” and constantly going at that pace has really not been good for her. Now Scully’s job has been ESPECIALLY hard on her body—it has quite literally given her cancer—but time as we normally live it was, and still is, a problem for women professionals; most professions expect their initiates to spend their 20s and 30s killing themselves for the job and then maybe slow down slightly as they enter middle age—a timeline which is utterly indifferent to female biology and the fact that getting pregnant, giving birth, and parenting get much harder for women after the age of 35. No matter when they do it, though, women who have children  _have_  to “slow down”—and then get penalized for it by managers and executives who don’t understand why anyone would want to take time off work for any purpose, let alone this one. In that final scene with the blanket, Mulder makes a joke about her “having David Crosby’s baby,” and Scully doesn’t respond. She’s thinking about her biological clock; and the show’s been thinking about it too, at least since “Home.” 

"All Things" gets her off that treadmill by allowing her to experience these ‘expanded’ moments where as far as the clocks (biological or otherwise) are concerned, only a fraction of a second passes, and yet they contain the seeds of a whole new life. And one of the signature features of this new life appears to be contact with other women. The X-ray mixup, which is our first Moment, and which leads to her discovery that Waterston is in the hospital, happens because one of the women behind the desk picks up a folder without looking and hands it to her. The next Moment is when Scully, who as always is on her cell phone with Mulder and not paying attention to whatever else she’s doing, nearly runs over a woman in white with a cap and a long blonde ponytail…who looks back at her as she walks away with what can really only be described as a come-hither look. Scully doesn’t follow her; but when she stops at Colleen’s house to pick up Mulder’s crop circle BS, she reveals that she’s still shaken up by the accident, which is what prompts Colleen to say the (initially highly annoying) words that eventually bring Scully back to her: "Maybe you need to slow down." Later, that same woman will lead her to the Buddhist shrine where she has the vision that may or may not eventually save Daniel’s life. 

Colleen is the first out lesbian we’ve seen on this show; and one might ask what it means that she shows up in the one episode Gillian Anderson wrote. Much as many of us would like to claim Scully and/or Anderson for our team, I don’t think it means that we can. Well, as long as "we" is "lesbians." I think you could actually make a strong case for this episode as establishing Scully as bisexual. But to me it seems as if Colleen and Carol, and their environment, were created by a sympathetic outsider who idealizes them somewhat because they appear to have so many things that are, if not out of reach for many straight women, at least harder to come by. Most importantly, Colleen and her house give Scully access to something that we old-timers used to call ‘lesbian space,’ and which I might describe for the young ‘uns as a place and a time with which men have nothing to do. You can see it on Scully’s face when she walks in and sees all the extremely curvy art carved of wood or made of other natural materials: there’s no place in her life that looks like this; there’s no place in her life that is this in tune with the shapes and rhythms and needs of the female body she inhabits. It’s a relief to her, psychologically and physically, to be there, and to just sit and have tea and talk to another woman about something that matters to her. 

Now, what they actually talk about, I have to say, kind of pisses me off. Colleen's "alternative" take on illness is basically of a piece with a whole strain of cancer self-help books advising cancer patients to focus on purging themselves of negativity and stress and promising that doing this will make their cancer go away. Though there is plenty of evidence that stress will contribute to people  _getting_ cancer, as indeed it contributes to the progress of many other illnesses and ailments, there's not quite so much evidence suggesting that once you have cancer you can will it away by slowing down and filling your thoughts with sunshine. One of my strongest memories from my own experience of cancer was trying--for the sake of my mother, who had given them to me--to listen to some meditation tapes put together by an 'alternative' doctor who was part of this movement. I couldn't stand it, partly because his voice was just ridiculous, but also partly because imagining my heart as a big quartz egg filling with light was in itself stressful. It made me feel as if I would be responsible for my own cure or death, and that only made me feel worse. My mother also gave me Bernie S. Siegel's classic of the cancer self-help genre, [Love, Medicine, and Miracles](http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/love-medicine-and-miracles-bernie-s-siegel/1102639059?ean=9780060919832). Reading THAT book, in which he continually trots out cases of patients who failed to adopt his positive thinking method and subsequently died horribly, made everything even worse. I decided that the best decision I could make to reduce my stress level was to stop reading it. And indeed, once I had disposed of it, I felt immediately better. Siegel's book, IMHO, is an insult to everyone who has ever died of cancer in that it puts the blame on them and their attitudes. Similarly, I had very little patience with Colleen's explanation about how once Daniel lets go of his guilt/fear/shame he'll recover. THe mind/body connection is real and I believe in it, but it is honestly not that simple. 

But this takes me back to the line I pulled out for the title of this post: though the X-File part of this episode may indeed be crap, there are many other ways in whcih this episode might save your life--if you're a woman, and/or someone who watches the X-Files because you identify with Scully. Colleen's new-agey alternative medicine is the kind of thing people did stereotypically associate with lesbian culture back in the 1990s; but not without cause. We’ve always had to build alternative spaces because the ones that already existed were hostile to us; we’ve always had to try to get outside structures that never wanted us to be together; and this often involved building belief systems and paradigms that ran counter to "common sense."  Although being out totally failed to cure my cancer, for instance, as it apparently did for Colleen, I’m sure that being in wouldn’t have helped it any. At any rate, it’s another way in which contact with other women reveals possibilities to Scully that her paranormal folie a deux with Mulder, so far, hasn’t. 

SCully's connection with Colleen, at any rate, allows her (maybe) to cure Daniel; but more important, it enables her to realize that she's "not the person" she was ten years ago when she entered into a career-ending liaison with an older married man who was also her teacher and mentor. After he recovers, she tells him straight up that he needs to take responsibility for his own behavior; and he's right. It's not Scully's fault that he pined after her tragically for ten years (without actually attempting to contact her, something which might have destroyed his lifesaving illusions), or that he broke up his own marriage by cheating on his wife, or that he decided what the hell, having sex with your young female students is ethically a-OK. 

But then there is the fact that the woman in white she’s chasing turns into Mulder in the end. Now a more hard-core old-school feminist critique would hate this, because it once again redirects Scully's desire back to the man who's had so much control over the past seven years of her life. But having mellowed with age, I guess, I see it more positively. I suppose if I say that I see this as Anderson making Mulder a kind of honorary woman, people will take it the wrong way. Perhaps what I should say, going back to the bisexuality hypothesis, is that in the moment when the woman she's chasing turns into Mulder, she begins to recognize him as someone who, despite his access to white male privilege, also experiences the world as it's built by patriarchy as a trap and has also--like so many women of all orientations--had to build his own paradigm in order to make any sense out of the large chunks of his own lived experience that "common sense" calls impossible or irrelevant. In other words, if we say that one thing she's doing throughout this episode is chasing the aspects of her femininity that her life has all but taken from her, that moment when she touches the woman and she turns around to become Mulder reminds her (and us) that Mulder was originally conceived of as a man in a woman's position--a man who incarnates a number of stereotypically 'feminine' qualities such as irrationality, volatility, fickleness, credulity, etc. and who has rejected the traditional masculine modes of mastery (rationality, careerism, etc.).

So with all this in mind, it's significant that the first thing he does is sheepishly admit that she was right about the crop circles being a waste of time. And then he goes back and hangs out with her on the couch, and actually talks about what she’s gone through; and although he argues with her about it--in this scene Anderson flips the skeptic/believer roles, for once, in a way that doesn't make Mulder act like an asshole—he recognizes its importance to her. It's the first time in the series that he has taken her visions, etc. seriously. It's also really the first time in the series that religion is used for purposes which have nothing to do with horror; and I think it's also significant that this revelation does NOT come to her in a Catholic church, so that the male hierarchy of the institutional Church is another patriarchal structure that she can escape from by following her desire to for contact with other women.

And Mulder lives up to all that--at least in this episode. He does for real, in this scene, all the things that Eddie Van Blundht faked in “Small Potatoes.” Mulder finally gets close to her; close enough to share the space in which she now lives. And this is what finally makes it possible for them to sleep together.

About that, I will only say how much I love that little scene before the credits for the way in which it flips the masculine cliches of filmmaking. It’s supposed to be the man dressing in a hurry and tiptoeing away from the scene of his last liaison, leaving the woman naked in bed. I mean she’s putting that skirt on the same way Kirk used to put on his boots after making it with a spacebabe. And then, the way the camera slowly pans up from Mulder’s feet to his head…I mean not only is that one of the biggest cintematographic cliches of the male gaze, but we just saw that EXACT thing done with both Jade Blue Afterglow and Maitreya’s bodies in “First Person Shooter.” This is why it matters to have women in charge behind the scenes and not just in front of the camera.


End file.
